Category: Buenos Aires Local Tours Archive

I’m a big fan of the alternative Tube map, so I though it would be fun to (badly) translate the station names of the Buenos Aires Subte system into English. This is what the Buenos Aires Undergr looks like (click on the image for the big version).

I had most problems with the stations named after people. Where I’ve been able to discover the origins of the name, that’s what you have, but a few have me stumped and appear in their original form. I will also confess to one translation being a total guess, but I’m not telling which one.

I also know that the H Line has now been extended to add “Hospitals”, but I was unable to find an online version of the latest map. Even the map on the official site still finishes at “Patrician’s Park”.

Fantastic photo tweeted by Commander Chris Hadfield and taken from the International Space Station of the River Plate emptying into the ocean. Buenos Aires can clearly be seen on the bottom bank of the river, as can Montevideo near where the mud ends. Bear in mind that the width of the river at Buenos Aires is 35 miles.

In the 1920’s two horses and one teacher undertook a mammoth journey and their exploits made them unlikely celebrities all over the world. Aimé Tschiffely, born in Berne, Switzerland had been working as a teacher in Buenos Aires and aged 30, having decided his life needed some adventure, he decided to ride 2 horses 21,500km from Buenos Aires to New York.

The horses he chose, Gato (Cat) & Mancha (Spot) were 15 and 16 years old respectively. Both were wild Criollo horses, direct descendants of the horses brought to Argentina by the Spanish in the 1500s, and neither had been broken, having spent their lives up until that point loose on the Pampa.

Tschiffely set off with his two sturdy companions on the 24th April 1925, leaving from the Sociedad Rural in Palermo, equipped with a rifle, a pistol and silver coins to pay Indian guides he would meet along his way.

The journey proved to be arduous, crossing jungle, swamps and at one point crossing the 5,900 metre Paso del Condór in Bolivia, but Gato & Mancha were more than up to the challenge. They may not have been up to the pedigree expected by Argentine society at the time, but Tschiffely wrote of them, “Their sturdy legs, short thick necks and Roman noses are as far removed from the points of a first-class English hunter as the North Pole from the South. Handsome is and handsome does, however, and I am willing to state my opinion boldly that no other breed in the world has the capacity of the Criollo for continuous hard work.“.

Gato fell lame in Mexico after being kicked by a mule but Tschiffely and Mancha continued onwards and 3 years, 4 months and 6 days after leaving Palermo, they arrived on 5th Avenue in New York on the 20th September 1928 (the date is now National Horse Day in Argentina) to a heroes welcome.

Gato & Mancha lived out their well-deserved retirement in Argentina and they died aged 36 and 40 respectively in the 1940s. Their preserved remains are displayed in the Emilio Udaondo museum in Luján. Tschiffely died aged 59 and is buried on an estancia in Ayacucho.

A more detailed account of the journey can be found here.

Whilst I love a good Tripadvisor review (currently 83 and counting, have you written yours yet?), I also enjoy reading more detailed writeups that the tour gets on personal blogs. It always helps me to see the tour in the same way that a tourist sees it, and I enjoy hearing about what they take away from it, plus there’s usually some great photos!

I’ve recently had 2 such writeups that I would recommend you also take a look and see what people get from my tour and thanks to both Dominika and Angela for taking the time to document their time with me!

• Buenos Aires Local Tours with Jonathan
• Buenos Aires by Foot…and by Train…and by Bus!

Some more great coverage – Real Argentina published a guide to alternative ways of seeing Buenos Aires and I get a mention: Alternative Tours of Buenos Aires

I’m very happy to report I’ve been featured in The Guardian in their recent South America special – read all about it here:

An Eye on the Pesos

My free daily walking tour visits the Abasto Shopping Centre, housed in the old central market, a beautiful Art Deco building constructed in the 1930s. Coming in a side door, we cross a large, enclosed area before making our way to the top level. This lower lever often houses promotions and entertainment for the kids and at the moment is home to an enormous scale model of Buenos Aires. UPDATE: As of mid-September the model is still there although cordoned off a little more than before, an information sign says the scale is 1500/1.

At first glance, it’s an impressive work, giving a good idea of the scale and spread-out nature of the city, but as you start to examine it more closely you realise that every single building in the city has been modelled. It’s truly an amazing piece of work and the following photos are some of the highlights. Click on the photo for the full-size version.

I came across this blog post yesterday which looks at stereotypes of each US State based on typing “Why is {State} so” into Google and seeing what comes up on the autocomplete. It’s fun little idea and I decided to undertake the same experiment for South America.

Argentina

First up, Argentina and the most popular question asked about the country, according to Google, is all to do with skin-colour. Second and fourth we have question relating to money, the latter one possibly explaining the former and number 3 is not surprisingly football (the answer is they didn’t qualify, but then neither did Holland, France or Germany).

If we change the question around a little and ask about the inhabitants rather than the country we hit a persistent stereotype straight away.

Interestingly when we run the same queries in Spanish we get slightly different results.

Searching for “Why are Argentinians so..” in Spanish shows a very superficial obsession with the top results being good-looking, ugly and blonde.

Uruguay

As for Uruguay, people are either questioning their national team’s high position in the FIFA ranking, or where does the name of the country come from.

Only one question pops up for the residents, and its one we see for every country except Brazil & Bolivia – why are the people white? It is clearly a common assumption that South America is still mostly populated by indigenous people and the number of “Europeans” obviously takes visitors by surprise.

Brazil

Moving to our larger neighbour in the North, let’s see what people have been asking Google about Brazil.

Maybe it’s good at football because it’s big and violent? As for the inhabitants we can see some familiar preconceptions cropping up, although numbers 2 and 4 surprise me a little as these are not questions I’ve ever asked myself.

Bolivia

I’m sorry Bolivia – there seems to be only one thing on the mind of Googlers when it comes to you.

Chile

And the burning questions everybody wants to ask about Chile, why is it so long and thin?

Although this seems to have an effect on its residents – long country, long face?

Colombia

Next up, Colombia. Sadly only one question actually appears and it is very predictable and unlike most stereotypes isn’t based entirely on current reality.

Whilst the country might be seen as dangerous, this image obviously doesn’t rub off on the inhabitants.

South America

And finally, searching for the entire continent sadly reveals something of how it is seen from the outside.

Buenos Aires is often compared to other cities around the world. Many a guidebook waxes lyrical about the “Paris of the South”. Puerto Madero is Manhattan (at least to those who have never been to Manhattan) and the leafy parks of Palermo have reminded more than one visitor to the large open space of Central Park. I like a good comparison and today I began wondering how did Buenos Aires stack up to other world cities in terms of size. I know it’s 80 square miles with a population of a shade under 3 million, but what does that mean, when comparing to another city I know well, such as London? I decided to find out.

Above is a map of London, taken from Google maps with the outline of Buenos Aires at the same scale overlaid. I’ve highlighted some of the well-known spots in the city to make it easier to gauge the size. The Plaza de Mayo is roughly where the London Bridge is, which puts Plaza Dorrego round about Waterloo, Caminito in Peckham and Plaza Italia the other side of Regents Park on Primrose Hill and Congreso de Tucuman way out in Hendon.

Paris is a much smaller city and the Péripherique fits nicely inside Capital Federal. Travel from Recoleta to Mataderos and you cross the entire Buenos Aires of the North. There might be architectural influences, but there’s a whole load more of it here than up there.

Moving to New York and the scale seems much more in line with each other. The 5 boroughs dwarf Capital Federal with Mataderos down on Governor’s Island and Plaza de Mayo up near Jackson Heights and La Guardia.

San Francisco fits quite nicely into the Argentine capital. If Recoleta is downtown, then you have to cross the Golden Gate Bridge to get to Congreso de Tucuman, and buy a boat to get to the market at Liniers.

Here we have my old hometown of Geneva, totally swamped by my new place of residence. The city itself is about one tenth of Buenos Aires and both Caminito and the end of the D Line both find themselves in France either side of the town where one of Buenos Aires’ most famous sons, Jorge Luis Borges is buried.

These images are not the most precise maps in the world (and I make no guarantee of their complete accuracy), but are a bit of fun and help put the size of Buenos Aires, and the journeys we take here every day into perspective. I’ll keep adding more over the next few days – if there is a city you would like me to add, let me know in the comments.

**UPDATE**

As requested by Beatrice, here is the clash of the sprawls – Buenos Aires takes on Los Angeles

And especially for my friend Daniel here is Stockport masquerading as Plaza Once

It probably won’t come of any great surprise that I hold somewhat of a fascination with the humble Buenos Aires colectivo. They are everywhere, speeding down the wide avenues of Palermo and clogging the narrow streets of Microcentro, yet to a new arrival in the city thinking of catching one they seem impossibly complicated and confusing. One of my main motivations in starting Buenos Aires Local Tours was to help visitors to the city to decipher the system and allow them to begin to discover the city by themselves, as the residents do. Catching a colectivo in Buenos Aires is an adventure and if it drops you roughly where you need to be it’s quite an achievement!

So, when I came across a project called Colectivaizeishon, in which a Brit called Daniel Tunnard (interview with him here) was undertaking to catch all of the 140 bus lines in the city and write about the experience I was fascinated. A little annoyed about not having had the idea first, but fascinated nonetheless.

I got in touch with Daniel, complimenting him on such a great idea and confessing my own obsession with the Buenos Aires colectivo, and then began following his adventures as they appeared on his blog. Then, in April, with the end of the project in sight, he invited me to spend a day on the buses with him. To some people, the idea of sitting (or standing) on a collection of urban buses for up to 13 hours might not appeal, but I leaped at the chance and a couple of days later made my way to Palermo in the early hours of a Wednesday morning to begin the adventure.

Our first bus of the day was the 161 which would take us to Villa Lugano. However it turns out that the 161 doesn’t run to Villa Lugano anymore, it only goes as far as Liniers. Now this would have had me scurrying for cover to recalculate my day’s travel, but Daniel took it in his stride and we got on anyway and set off for Liniers. As we passed through places I had either never heard of or only seen as names on the side of colectivos, Daniel got busy noting down the things that were happening around us. It was a little bit disconcerting to see things you said immediately transcribed, but it also added a certain gravitas to the proceedings. As we approached San Martin I commented that it was very foggy, upon which Daniel began scribbling in his notebook and I glanced over to see my throwaway comment had been immortalised as the much more dramatic “Fog Descends”.

Approaching Liniers, after some frantic searching in the Guia T, it was decided that we’d reached the end of the line and that it was time to jump off and catch the next bus, the 185 which would get us to our original destination of Villa Lugano. The 185 took us through the wonderfully named La Matanza (The Massacre, a reference to an attack on Spanish settlers by some of the locals in the 1500s), which as a town has the even more wonderful slogan La Matanza Avanza.

Daniel happily confesses that one of the main problems about catching a bus and then writing about the experience is that nothing much actually happens. Having spent a day with him, I can indeed attest to that fact, and a routine is quickly begun, consisting of sitting on a bus for 90 minutes, getting off said bus, and then after the quickest of breaks, getting on another bus. From Villa Lugano we caught the 115 which took us past enormous amounts of damage from the storm that had hit the city a few days previously. I’d barely been aware of it at the time, but clearly out here it had had a huge impact and the clean up had barely begun.

The 115 took us as far as Retiro, where we didn’t hang around long and jumped on the 126 which would take us to Mataderos. I was very much looking forward to the end of the 126 as we were going to be stopping at a Colectivaizeishon favourite spot for lunch – the Petrobras service station by the General Paz ring road! And it turns out that they do a pretty decent lunch there. We sat down and ate, and I was feeling pretty happy with myself as we had completed the 4 lines we had set out to do that day, and it was only 1pm!

So, I innocently asked what was next, would we be catching any more lines today, only to have feel my spirits sink when I was I informed that we now had to catch all 4 back the other way. So, not only is he catching all 140 lines, he has to catch them in BOTH directions. So, finishing my ham and cheese panini we rejoin the queue to catch the 126 back to Retiro for the second time that day.

The 115 and the 185 then dutifully returned us to Liniers (where I was privileged to be shown Daniel’s most highly-recommended public toilets in Buenos Aires, although I’m sworn to secrecy as to their actual location – if word gets out they’ll be ruined), whereupon we caught the 161 which trundled through miles of rush hour traffic to return us to Palermo about 12 hours after we had left it.

After a full day I’m not sure I would want to take 136 more lines, but I certainly got to see parts of Buenos Aires I would never normally get to see, and whilst nothing really happened (neither good nor bad), I can now see the 161 in Plaza Italia and know with smug inner-nerd satisfaction that I have caught it all the way to Liniers and back. Not many people can say that, now can they?